Conventional wisdom would say that with all the technological breakthroughs that humankind makes on a regular basis, and the rate at which we see technology become obsolete through newer, faster, more efficient devices, that the fuel economy of our vehicles would be constantly improving.

Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. The photo included in this post is from a car advertisement in the UK at the peak of the 1980’s energy crisis. This ad, for a Peugeot 205, claims that it is able to get 72.4 MPG at a steady 90km/h, only dropping to 56 MPG at 120km/h. This isn’t a hybrid. It’s not some fancy prototype. It’s just a run of the mill production car from 1983 that uses less gas than even the most fuel efficient car on the market in Canada in 2008.

The problem is that we haven’t been incentivizing our car manufacturers in North America to produce fuel efficient vehicles. Since we drive pretty much the same vehicles as our neighbors to the south, I’m going to talk about US fuel economy standards, as it is their standards that really drive our fuel efficiency (in fact, Canada currently does not have binding fuel efficiency standards, just voluntary ones).

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations in the US require manufacturers to meet an weighted average fuel economy, or else pay a fine. The weighted average means that if a company sells 10 cars that get 20 MPG, and 5 cars that get 30 MPG, then the weighted average of that car company is:

[(10 x 20) + (5 x 30)]/15 = [200 +150]/15 = 350/15 = 23.3 MPG.

In 2008, that average value had to be equal to, or above 27.5 MPG. For every 0.1MPG below that, the manufacturer must pay $5.50 per vehicle to the government. The problem is that is has been at 27.5 MPG for the last 18 years.

In 1978, the US Government enacted these standards to reduce dependence on foreign oil. In just 7 years, passenger vehicles were required to become 50% more fuel efficient. And guess what? They did. Auto manufacturers were able to meet that challenge because there was a penalty for not doing so. Since 1985, the US has mandated less than a 2% increase in fuel efficiency in passenger vehicles.

The result was that manufacturers didn’t have to focus on fuel economy any more. We made technology breakthroughs, and our cars became better, and even burn less gas per kilogram than before, but they have become heavier, faster, more powerful, and unfortunately no better in terms of gas mileage.

Both Japan and Australia have implemented fuel economy standards that will require vehicles to be almost 30% more efficient than those in North America for 2010. Europe goes even further, with standards in place that will make cars over 50% more fuel efficient my 2012.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a process where carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) is captured from the gases leaving a fossil fuel burning site, compressed into a liquid, and stored indefinitely in underground geological storage. It allows industries that burn fossil fuels (such as coal fired power stations, oil and gas facilities, cement factories, e.t.c) to continue burning fossil fuels while greatly reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air.

There are a variety of different ways to do this, from chemical absorption processes, to combustion of fuels in pure oxygen, but all of them have the same effect: approximately 90% removal of carbon dioxide from the gases being emitted to the atmosphere.

Why hasn’t anyone heard of it?

Well, while the technology has been around to do this for decades, there is simply no economic reason to do so at the moment. Adding CCS to an existing combustion plant will increase the operating cost of the facility dramatically. A coal fired power plant would expect to see a 20-30% drop in output as a direct result of implementing CCS, meaning less electricity to sell to the public.

A few demonstration plants have sprung up around the world, showing us that it can be done, such as in Weyburn, SK, or Sleipner in the North Sea, or even In Salah in Algeria. The UK government has committed to building the worlds first coal fired power plant with commercial scale CCS, while Norway and the province of Alberta have also committed significant funds for large scale demonstration projects.

Many of these initial projects are driven by enhanced oil recovery, where injection of carbon dioxide assists in the recovery of oil. These projects are useful in the early stages of CCS technology, as the additional revenue from the oil makes CCS more economically attractive, so the technology gets developed; however, in the long term CCS will hopefully be used purely for carbon dioxide storage, and not to increase oil production.

Is it safe?

Carbon dioxide is an inert gas, meaning it doesn’t really react with anything under normal conditions. The idea is to inject the gas deep underground (we’re talking km here), into old, empty oil and gas fields, or even saline aquifers (underground water formations too salty to drink). With correct site identification, we should be confident that these sites can safely contain carbon dioxide indefinitely, since the same rock formations that held oil and gas in place for millions of years will hold the carbon dioxide in place. Obviously there is a need for prudent regulation, to ensure that projects that are developed are safe both for society and the environment.

Isn’t this just like pretending we don’t have a problem?

In a way, yes. It allows us to continue burbing fossil fuels, without having to search for alternative, inherently cleaner forms of energy. However, it does give us the opportunity to act now. I personally see it as a temporary solution. It allows us to take drastic action now to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions at a reasonable cost to society, while giving us perhaps another 50-75 years (hopefully sooner) to find a better long term solution. There is plenty of room out there though, with the US Department of Energy stating that there is potentially enough underground storage capacity in the US and Canada to store 900 years worth of our current emissions from large emitters.

The primary purpose of this meeting is to make progress on what will be the successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, and was the international agreement under which 37 industrialized nations committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to and average value between 2008 and 2012 of 5.2% below 1990 levels. It allowed for many different flexible mechanisms for industrialized countries to achieve these targets such as emissions trading as we see in the EU, or the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or Joint Implementation (JI) which allowed them to make greenhouse gas reduction investment in developing countries.

Canada committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990, although we have failed to live up to that target with our countries emissions instead spiralling to 22% above 1990 levels in 2006.

There were many criticisms of the original Kyoto Protocol, many of which were fully justified. These included:

• Lack of greenhouse gas reduction commitments for developing countries (such as India and China)
• Failure to include emissions from airplanes, ships and deforestation among others
• The ease with which free-riders obtained CDM or JI credits (projects which received funding for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that would have gone ahead without the funding)

However, the criticism of these issues often overshadows the importance of the Kyoto Protocol. It represented the first major international collaborative attempt to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The task of solving climate change is a gargantuan one, and one that we will not be able to solve instantaneously. It is going to be a step-by-step process. Kyoto was the first step. Hopefully, this conference in Poland is going to be another step.

In 2012, the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end, and we need another international agreement in place to succeed it. Ideally, we can address many of the problems that Kyoto had, but probably not all of them. In order to have something in place for 2013, the international community will need to have finalized discussions by the end of next year so that individual governments can start planning.

Let’s keep the pressure on our governments to keep working hard towards a solution.

While there is an almost unanimous awareness of climate change (or global warming as they tend to know it), there is a definite lack of understanding of the causes and effects. A majority of students appeared to associate climate change with the depletion of the ozone layer, and many seemed to believe that climate change was a result of things such as garbage as opposed to greenhouse gases. That’s a concern to me, as for Canadian’s to be engaged to the climate change debate, they need to understand not only the problem, but the solutions on offer.

What really surprised me though was the level of insight of the questions that the students asked. I briefly discussed carbon capture and storage, purposefully not going into the details because I thought it would be too technical and not capture their interest, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. All three groups I talked to latched onto it immediately. They posed questions which I have never heard adults in the general population ask me before, and are exactly the type of questions we need all Canadians to be asking.

“How much carbon dioxide can we store underground?”

“Is it a gas or a liquid that we are storing?”

“What are the chances of it leaking?”

“Is there any risk to other plants or animals, or some other long term problem that we haven’t thought about?”

We hope to focus our programs on critical thinking skills, teaching students how to think around a topic, not just take it at face value. It was encouraging to see that kids are not only able, but very interest in having a conversation like this.

With the environment becoming a bigger and bigger issue by the day, many consumers are demanding to know the environmental impact of the things they buy. And businesses are beginning (slowly) to respond.

The concept it to label consumer goods with something similar to a nutritional label, but for the environment. Tesco, a major grocery reatiler around the globe, has made commitments to make the carbon footprints of it’s products as easy to compare as their nutritional information or their price. The photo on this post is from a Tesco store, showing the carbon footprint of one brand of juice and comparing to others available for sale.

While displaying a carbon footprint is one step, it’s possible to take this idea even further. Products could clearly display information such as the amount of:

• Carbon dioxide released
• Water consumed
• Raw materials used
• Waste sent to landill

We would be able to clearly identify which products were better for the environment, rather than having to rely on often misleading marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Unlike food, the environmental impact of a product is largely external, while nutritional information is internal. That means that for nutritional labels, we simply have to look at what is in the food, while for environmental labels we have to look both inside and around it.

We need to look at the raw materials that were used, and the methods used to extract them. We need to consider the factory where the product was built, and how it was powered. We need to consider how the product is used (a car for example, emits carbon dioxide as it runs). And we need to look at how the product is disposed of, as well as everything else in between.

It quickly becomes a case of ‘where do we draw the line’.

Until we have some sort of accepted standard in place, it will be hard to compare one product to another, as we don’t know whether they have included the same things.

Fortunately, some standards are being developed. The Carbon Trust in the UK now certifies products for the carbon dioxide emissions, with the certification being removed if a product increases its emissions per unit from year to year.

It would be easy for a bystander to take these arguments on board as scientific fact; however, each and everyone one of these arguments I have heard has actually been rejected by the vast majority of the scientific community. I’m planning to go through the biggest climate change myths over the next few months, trying to seperate the truths, the partial truths, and the outright lies. Keep in mind, that it’s not only the climate change deniers who are guilty of exageration; sometimes the advocates of climate change are just as guilty of distorting the truth to get their point across.

So, in the words of Campbell Brown, we’ll be taking a ‘No bias. No bull’ approach.

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is often cited as an example of a time when the earth went through a period of global warming, and temperatures escalated above their climatic averages. Usually, I’ve also heard that the average global temperature during the MWP was higher than it is today.

This is a case of a partial truth. There was indeed a Medieval Warm Period (from about 900-1300 A.D), and temperatures were indeed higher than their climatic averages for the time. However, was it global, and were the average temperatures higher than todays? Evidence suggests otherwise.

The initial research into the MWP was done using data from the North Atlantic/European region, where the effect was most clearly observable.

Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstruction (0-2000 A.D)

However, by looking at other regions of the world during the same time period, we can that climate patterns opposite to those occuring in the North Atlantic and European region were happening elsewhere. We have to remember that what we are faced with now, is the prospect of global climate change, not regional, so we have to look at what was happening on a global basis during the MWP.

So how warm was the Medieval Warm Period?

By looking at tree rings, and ice core sample, scientists are able to draw up an approximation of a regions climates. As temperature is a regional phenomenon, each sample can only tell us about what was happening in that region. As I mentioned earlier, the MWP is thought to have been most prominent in the Northern Hemisphere, yet even there, the warmest period during the MWP is thought to have been 0.35C cooler than the average temperature from 1970-2000.

So in conclusion?

Yes, there was a Medieval Warm Period, likely caused by natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate (like El Nino, increased volcanic activity).

But, it was likely only regional, and even at it’s peak, still cooler than the global average temperatures we are seeing today.

The current level of global average temperature is unlike those ever witnessed by humankind, and it is still increasing. We have moved beyond natural climatic cycles, and into man-made climate change.

So what exactly is The Gaia Project?

Well, the hope is that The Gaia Project will grow into a social enterprise, offering for-profit environmental services, that will in turn fund our educational out-reach programs. We’re looking at the possibility of green event planning, and carbon auditing as possible for-profit services in the future, but right now, we’ll be starting things off with our charitable, educational programs.

We’re going to go to schools and deliver an interactive, project based, and continually engaging program to students to encourage them to take their interest in climate change beyond recycling. As we develop these programs more fully, I’ll be posting some updates here on the website.

And the website is for….?

The website could become many things, and I’m hoping to hear from all of our readers what they think about the current layout, and what they would like to see on here in the future. Current plans are

• Articles posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday covering climate change news, ideas and solutions
• Information on our educational programs, including additional resources for students and adults alike
• Forums, where you can get together and voice your opinions, ideas, and explain why you have given up showering to save the planet (or at least that’s what you’re telling people!)
• A home page for our future business endeavours

So what makes The Gaia Project different?

Climate change is not a new problem. We’ve suspected something has been going on for decades, yet we haven’t done anything. There are a number of reasons for this, but I believe that one of the big ones is that so far, the voice of the realistic environmentalist hasn’t been heard.

I’m not asking people to abandon their fridges like Green as Thistle. I’m not asking you to cut yourself off from the electricity grid like Greenpa. I’m not saying that we need to make wholesale changes like No Impact Man. These people’s efforts are admirable, and can serve as lessons to us all, but let’s face it, cold showers aren’t most peoples idea of a good time!

I’m hoping that The Gaia Project can fill this niche. We recognize that we’ll keep consuming energy at an ever increasing rate, and that conservation isn’t going to get us to where we need to go. We realize that people are willing to make small sacrifices, but don’t want to see wholesale changes in their quality of life. And we understand that fighting climate change can be done from within a (relatively) free market system. We’re non-partisan realists, not idealists.

So let’s make the small changes where we can, and force our governments to start the type of institutional level change we need to maintain our quality of life at a lower cost to the planet.

All I am asking for us to do a little better.

Today’s post is looking at what I am calling ‘Green Obligations’. Instead of applying a cost to negative behaviour, we put a premium, or a requirement, on clean behaviour.

In this context, the term ‘Green Obligation’ refers to a minimum level of a product that must be done in some pre-defined green, and sustainable way. The government specifies a steadily increasing target that industry must reach in order to be allowed to continue to operate without being slapped with a hefty penalty. We’ve got examples of this running already in Canada. In Ontario, fuel suppliers were obligated to supply fuel with a minimum content of 5% ethanol by 2007.

A much bigger scheme operating outside this country would be the Renewables Obligation operating in the UK. Under this program, anyone selling electricity must ensure that a minimum amount of the electricity that they sell comes from renewable sources. Currently, this is set at 9.1%, rising to 15.4% by 2016. Suppliers who fail to meet their obligation must make a penalty payment, that is then shared amongst the suppliers in proportion to the amount of renewable electricity that they generated. This incetivizes generators to meet, and even exceed the obligation level.

Related to a minimum obligation is the idea of a feed-in tariff. Under this system, a supplier is guaranteed a minimum level of payment for producing a product with fewer emissions than the traditional method. This minimum level of payment is set at a level above the normal market price of the product in order to encourage its growth, and offset the cost of the more expensive method of production.

The most well known example of this is in Germany. There, electricity suppliers must purchase renewable energy supplied to the grid by anyone in the country at a fixed price. The rate varies from a low of €0.03/kWh for large scale hydro power, to €0.54/kWh for domestic scale solar power. Each year the minimum amount payable reduces in order to incentivise continued improvement. Some of these rates are substantially above the cost of generating electricity from coal, which makes everyone’s electricity bill slightly more expensive, but that is essential in order to develop these emerging technologies. In 2007, renewables in Germany provided 14.2% of the countries electricity, double what it was in 2002, at an additional cost of about €4bn per year (about $75 per person per year). It’s worth pointing out though that approximately 230,000 people were employed in the renewables sector in 2006 in Germany, and it has become a global leader and exporter of renewable technologies.

There are two major benefits of obligations or feed-in tariffs. The first is that it guarantees suppliers that there will be a defined market or level of financial return for their product. The second is that is forces investment into technologies that might otherwise be ignored, bringing the costs down.

The disadvantage is that by choosing specific technologies, we may not be choosing the most cost effective solution to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The incentive of a feed-in tariff, or the requirement of an obligation on a less effective technology can lead to under-investment in a more effective parallel technology.

Instead of charging a fixed tax for each tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, the government sets a limit on annual emissions for the country (called the ‘cap’). These limits are then allocated to polluters, giving them a right to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide for the year. Let’s imagine these allocations as certificates, each one allowing the owner to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide

If the polluter has the right number of certificates to cover the amount of carbon dioxide that he emits during the year, then life is simple. At the end of the year, he submits one certificate to the government for every tonne of carbon dioxide that he emitted.

However, if the polluter doesn’t have enough certificates to cover the amount of carbon dioxide that he emits, then he needs to buy more to ensure that he complies with government regulations.

But where can he buy them? We can’t create new ones, otherwise the number of certificates would be larger than the carbon dioxide we set earlier.

Fortunately, some polluters will have more certificates than they need, and they are free to sell them to the highest bidder (the ‘trade’ part of the system). It works on a very simple supply and demand principle If there are a lot of extra certificates available, then the price of these traded certificates is low. If there aren’t many available, then the price goes up. Each year, the number of certificates are reduced in line with emission targets. Polluters are faced with an ever decreasing supply of certificates, and thus an increasing price of buying the additional ones that they need to continue business as usual.

So how does this result in emissions being cut?

Well, there are many technologies or options available to industry to reduce emissions, from changing energy sources, to increasing efficiency, to capturing and storing the carbon dioxide. Right now, the cost of these carbon reduction technologies is prohibitively expensive, but as the cost of buying all of these additional certificates gets higher and higher, they begin become economically viable.

For example, a power generation company has a coal fired power plant. It’s always been cheap to run, because coal is cheap, and no-one has been charging them for the huge amount of carbon dioxide they emit every year. This is the ‘Business As Usual’ scenario shown in the chart below.

A cap and trade system is put in place, and in the first phase they are only allowed to emit 90% of the carbon dioxide they did in the previous year. It’s a small reduction, and they have two options; continue to operate as normal and and pay the small price associated with buying additional certificates (P1 – Purchase), or to reduce their emissions (P1 – Reduce). At their disposal is a technology known as carbon capture and storage, where the carbon dioxide is capture from the chimney and permanently stored underground. As you can see, at this stage, it is much cheaper for the power station owner to buy certificates, essentially paying someone else to reduce their emissions on his behalf.

Over the next few years, they receive fewer and fewer certificates until one year they are only allowed to emit 75% of the amount of carbon dioxide that they could in the first year. Again, the same two options are available (P2 – Purchase and P2 – Reduce), but the most preferable option has changed. This time, the additional cost of carbon capture and storage is much cheaper than having to buy the additional certificates. The main reason for this is that they have managed to reduce his emissions far below the amount that was required, meaning that they are now able to sell their excess certificates.

At a certain carbon dioxide certificate price, options like these make economic sense. For different technologies, and different industries, it happens at different certificate prices. The beauty of it is that in a highly efficient market such as Canada, the price of a certificate should be more or less equal to the cheapest way possible to meet the annual emission target. If someone can reduce their emissions for less, it is better to pay them to do it rather than waste money doing it yourself. We have incentivized the market to find the cheapest possible solution to climate change.

The overriding advantage of a cap and trade system is that, assuming there is a large enough penalty for breaking the rules, it guarantees emission reductions. The cost of buying an additional certificate will just keep rising until someone cuts their emissions. And since no-one has an unlimited supply of money to spend on certificates, at some point that becomes their only choice. It focuses directly on the problem by setting a maximum amount of carbon dioxide that we want to emit, as opposed to the indirect method of trying to specify an appropriate level of carbon tax to reduce emissions to the required level.

The downside is that it is a very complex system. Because of this it would take a number of years to implement. A large amount of administration would be needed to regulate the trading of these certificates, and because of the complexity associated with buying and selling certificates, it can really only be applied to large industrial emitters which make up only about 50% of Canada’s annual emissions. Also, due to the fact that cost of a certificate is not fixed, there is a certain element of uncertainty about what the price might be in 5 or 10 years time. For large industries, spending large amounts of money on projects that may well be operational for 25-50 years, this uncertainty can be a source of great frustration.

Emissions trading has been proven before, as it has been in use since 1990 in the United States in order to try and reduce sulphur dioxide emissions (responsible for acid raid) by 10 million tonnes from 1980 levels.. The most widely known example of a carbon dioxide cap and trade system is the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. It has been running since 2005, and has had its fair share of teething problems. In the first phase, far too many certificates were handed out, meaning that virtually no-one needed to buy them, and those that did had an enormous number available to sell. The result was that the cost of a certificate dropped to about $0.01 per tonne of carbon dioxide. Lessons have been learned, and the second phase is proving to be much more successful, with the price currently trading at about $36 per tonne.

Years ago, Arthur Pigou, proposed taxing actions that had a negative effect on society to accurately reflect the cost to society. Cigarette and alcohol taxes are useful examples of ‘Pigovian taxes’, as the base price of these products do not take into account the negative effects of smoking or drinking, which take the form of a lower level of health for the general population and thus increased costs for healthcare.

The rapid rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions can be can be looked at as a market failure. Unlike, solid waste, or liquid discharges, greenhouse gas emissions in Canada have never had a financial cost associated with them. Disposing of solid waste incurs waste removal and dumping fees, while liquid discharges usually require extensive, anf often expensive, treatment before they can be released. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions have been enjoying a free ride, silenty and steadily increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The result of this has been that the cost of an activity (e.g. driving) did not truly reflect the cost to our society. For example, a typical car running for 15,000km a year will emit more than 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air, ultimately causing problems and costs to be incurred by future generations through global warming.

Most economists would argue that if we are going to have any chance of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that we emit to the atmosphere, then we have to impose some sort of cost on emitting carbon dioxide. A carbon tax is one possible way of doing this.

Polluters of carbon dioxide would see an instant cost associated with their actions. As the tax increases, the cost to the polluter increases to the point where they will save money by investing in carbon reducing technologies. It’s a classic application of the Polluter Pays Principle. Carbon taxes are not a new idea, having been in use in Sweden since 1991. More recently, British Columbia introduced a tax of $10 per tonne of CO2 that became effective on July 1st, 2008. This BC tax will rise at $5 per year until it reaches $30 per tonne in 2012.

The cost of paying these taxes or implementing carbon reduction technologies will ultimately be passed through to the final user; that is average Canadians. Opponents of carbon taxes love to make a lot of noise about how Canadians don’t need to be taxed more, especially through one that would be hidden and disguised in the price we pay for goods and services. And this is true, we don’t. But a carbon tax doesn’t mean we have to be taxed more. We can design it to be revenue neutral.

Governments would have a new source of revenue from carbon dioxide polluters, and could use this extra income to reduce income taxes, as well as those on our investments. We would have more disposable income to spend, which would need to be spent on rising prices associated with the carbon tax, especially on our energy bills. However, we live in a free market and this gives us two unique opportunities.

Firstly, we could change our behaviour, and secondly, we are free to choose who we purchase our goods and services from. Those companies that are more efficient at reducing their carbon emissions will have fewer costs that they need to pass through to the final consumer, and purchasing those products or services over their less efficient competitors will represent a net cost saving to us.

Let’s use driving as an example. We have two driver’s, A and B. Both drivers earn the same amount of money and pay the same amount of tax. Before the introduction of the carbon tax, they both spend $1,000 a year on gas, and buy their gas from the same gas station. A carbon tax is introduced, causing the price of gas to go from $1 a litre to $1.25 a litre at their local pumps. The government gives everybody a $200 tax rebate to cover the cost of this increase.

Driver A doesn’t change his habits. He now spends an extra $250 a year on gas, slightly more than the $200 rebate he was given.

Driver B does change. She bikes to work one day a week, and uses 20% less gas. Because of the price rise, she actually spends the exact same amount on gas as he did before, but has been given $200 by the government to pay for it, which she can now put in the bank. On top of that, Driver B notices that a competing gas supplier has been able to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions more efficiently than his normal one, and that their gas has only gone up to $1.15 a litre. By changing her behaviour and rewarding companies who reduce carbon dioxide emissions effectively, Driver B can save over $300. She is also likely to consider buying a more fuel efficient vehicle when next purchasing one, saving her even more money.

Carbon taxes don’t have to increase the overall tax burden on a country, they just represent a 21st century shift in taxation to punish negative behaviour, and reward positive changes in peoples behaviour. Ensuring revenue neutrality requires that we have independent auditing of the system, a task well suited for the Auditor General.

The advantages of a carbon tax system is that is easy to introduce, and simple to enforce. It can be applied at all levels of our society, from large industrial emitters to individual Canadians. A forward plan for increasing the carbon tax gives individuals and businesses some element of cost certainty, enabling them to take this into account when making longer term purchases (e.g. truck vs. electric car).

The downside is that a carbon tax does not guarantee a reduction in emissions. The polluter still has the right to continue to emit carbon dioxide, albeit at a cost. A carbon tax has no legal requirement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, only an economic reason to do so.

The ideal result of a carbon tax, is that we reduce the amount of carbon we emit. And if we don’t, then it raises additional revenue for the government to pay the inevitable costs of global warming. Emitting carbon dioxide isn’t free; we just haven’t been paying the bill.